Curationism. David Balzer
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of documents, usually catalogues, always running around at a very fast pace. . . Whenever I showed up somewhere, Hans Ulrich was often already there – but only for 24 hours.’
It was around this time, 1993, that Obrist began to identify officially as a curator, his CV subsequently becoming a litany of exhibitions, biennials, publications and sundry appearances and accomplishments. Obrist worked at the MAMVP as a salaried, capital-C curator from 2000 to 2006. He took his current position at London’s Serpentine Gallery, with the title Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, in 2006. This arguably marks the beginning of his bona fide international celebrity. A Blouin ArtInfo piece from 2008 calls him ‘as close to a rock star as a curator can be,’ attributing 150 international exhibitions to him since 1991.
Nineteen ninety-three was not only the year Obrist officially embraced curator but also when he officially began to record interviews, a medium in which he has become a sort of guru. At the time of the publication of his second volume of interviews in 2010, Obrist was purportedly in possession of two thousand hours of taped interviews with various artists, architects, filmmakers, scientists, historians, etc., all organized by the interviewee’s last name. In that book alone, Obrist interviewed subjects as diverse as Björk, Doris Lessing and Alejandro Jodorowsky. In Surface, editor Karen Marta calls his interviews his ‘divine passion’ and likens them to poems. Obrist describes them as his retreat, his ‘secret garden.’
Despite that avowal, Obrist’s interviewing constitutes a colossal, very public aspect of his work. His impressive bibliography is in large part made up of ongoing transcripts of these interviews: in addition to two collected volumes, there is a series of smaller monographic artist-interview books (an extension of his Art Basel Conversations series), of which there are, to date, more than twenty; A Brief History of Curating and A Brief History of New Music, compendiums of interviews with important curators and composers; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, an interview-based advice manual and professional biography. To wit, all of Obrist’s published interviews could fill a sizable shelf.
In 2006, Obrist’s first year at the Serpentine Galleries, he began his Marathon series, the inaugural version taking place around a pavilion designed with Rem Koolhaas (every year, Obrist and Peyton-Jones commission a different artist-designed pavilion on the grounds of the gallery). This first version, twenty-four hours in length, consisted of non-stop interviews with dozens of cultural figures – David Bailey, Damien Hirst and Ken Loach among them. Obrist continues to host different sorts of Marathons on a yearly basis. In 2013, the topic was his 89plus project, co-conceived with curator Simon Castets, which highlights young artists born after 1989. Essentially, the Marathons are symposia or salons (a historical concept that greatly fascinates him) running without adjournment, the absurdity or effortfulness of this durational aspect making it performance art as well as a meeting of minds. True to Obrist’s obsessive-compulsive nature, all Marathons are recorded and transcribed.
Obrist’s commitment to the interview and to the general proliferation of work is reminiscent of Andy Warhol. But Warhol, the Pittsburgh-raised child of working-class parents from Czechoslovakia, created his Factory in Manhattan as a paradoxical mirroring and parody of the American industrial system. At the cheekily named studio, Warhol instigated a number of different projects. His screen tests mimicked the assembly-line star-making process of major Hollywood studios; his early films, boring by design, extended the screen tests to depict extempore scenarios and, with his eight-hour film Empire (1964), a single slowed-down static shot of the Empire State Building, simultaneously celebrate the quotidian modern and deride the Hollywood epic. As Camille Paglia points out in her study Glittering Images, Warhol’s famous silkscreens, which allowed him to turn out artworks at a breakneck pace, used ‘a commercial process for fabric design. . . Disdaining authorship, he often used a rubber stamp to sign his paintings, and he professed indifference to their fate; they were as disposable as any other product of American manufacturing, then geared to planned obsolescence.’ Warhol was lucrative, but his professed attitude toward his work was a characteristic lassitude. He was both self-propagating and self-negating; poet and critic Tan Lin notes in the fall 2001 issue of Cabinet, ‘Eye and mouth are both surrogate modes of “being oneself”’ and ‘Warhol’s two favorite surrogates were his tape-recorder and his camera.’ Warhol, the ultimate postmodernist, turned himself into a machine in a kind of nihilistic denial of authenticity and authorship. His artistry was the sellout, his success at the cost of the essential him, whatever that was.
Obrist does this as well, but oddly, as a successor of Warhol, he is much more ingenuous. On examination, he seems the anti- or bizarro Warhol. In 2012, New York magazine noted his complete lack of ennui: ‘He’s not over anything, even as he’s always on to the next thing.’ Like Warhol, Obrist privileges self-negation, but it is of a remarkably different sort. ‘I learned everything from artists,’ he says, and his interview subjects reliably testify to this self-effacing sensitivity and curiosity. (‘Curating always follows art, not the other way around – that would be awful.’) Samuel Keller calls him ‘the artist’s best friend’; Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 and curator-at-large at MoMA, calls him an ‘idea machine.’ Like Warhol, Obrist has a fascination with memory, but not in the sense of letting it be absorbed or displaced by the mechanics and gadgetry around him. Obrist’s commitment to memory is old-fashioned. To all his interviewees, to all the artists with whom he works, he offers, as the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 humbly yet lavishly offers his lover, ‘The living record of your memory. / ’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity.’ Obrist calls his ongoing process of recording and preserving interviews ‘a text-machine’ (‘PhD students transcribe them into various languages’), but the end goal, unlike that of Warhol, a ditzy hoarder obsessed with trash, is rigorous, possessive archivalism. Obrist’s productivity sets the gears of Warhol’s Factory in reverse. His aim is to preserve. And so rather than the post-war American industrialists, Obrist’s implicit model, while related, is earlier: the American Puritans and their proverbial work ethic. The title of one of his books, dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop, is like a Dadaist take on a Puritan homily (e.g., ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playthings’). The title of his celebrated exhibition series, Do It, also recalls a homily. Ongoing since 1993 (that year, again), Do It is a series of instructions for exhibitions written by famous people Obrist has encountered. Its emphasis on didactic or pedagogical text as the basis for action, however whimsical, also suggests the Puritans, known for their devotion to scripture or ‘the Word.’
Obrist’s fraught relationship with sleep is also puritanical. Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep provides the ideal counterpoint; this five-hour-long work, a precursor to Empire, depicts poet John Giorno sleeping. That’s it. In this anti-film, sleep is the anti-subject: an oblivion suggesting death, a fixation of Warhol’s. His camera stare once more demonstrates his nihilism, his celebration of inactivity. Giorno is idle, and Warhol, though aspiring to a static take, was forced, due to technical limitations, to work with a wind-up camera and to employ a rather complex edit. In this way, both Warhol and his audience become captive witnesses to absence, with the film becoming a loving, accidentally busy paean to inactivity, thwarting traditional American values of industry. Incidentally, Giorno, according to legend, was the only one Warhol knew at the time who slept at length, given the prevalence of then-trendy ‘uppers’ among Warhol’s circle.
Obrist, while Swiss, is more American. Ironically for a Swiss, he has an antagonistic relationship with the clock, and time (because there is never enough of it) – and thus with sleep. ‘Sleep to me is like an accident,’ he says to Ingo Niermann in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, ‘because I really don’t want to sleep, and yet sleep outwits me again and again.’ In several interviews, Obrist has reiterated his life’s struggle with the body’s need for rest. This again can be dated to the early 1990s, when his career takes off. An ongoing commitment to travel is one method Obrist uses to defeat the clock. As W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi notes, he is always in a different time zone, and so is ‘in his own time zone somehow. There is no way to say where he is, because he doesn’t have a time zone.’
In his war with sleep, Obrist looked at cultural precedent. French novelist Honoré de Balzac legendarily drank cup upon cup of coffee every day to sustain